For Your Reference

What Is Commodity Production?

by Nan Ching

ALL products of labour made for exchange are called commodities. Lenin
said: “A commodity is, in the first place, a thing that satisfies a human want; in the second place,
it is a thing that can be exchanged for another thing.” A commodity has two properties: use-value
and value. To become a commodity, a thing should first of all possess use-value. For instance, clothes
are used for warmth and a machine tool is used in production. The fact that two different commodities
can be exchanged is because there is something in common between them. Every commodity item is created
by human labour and is the crystallization of human labour without any distinction. A certain amount of
human labour is embodied in every kind of commodity. The value of a commodity is the human labour in
general congealed in it. Therefore, what is common to, all commodities is value. The magnitude of the
value in a commodity is determined by the amount of labour-time socially necessary for producing it. In
exchanging commodities according to value, people actually exchange their own labour. This is why Marx
stressed that a commodity is not just a material thing, but a definite social relation between people
concealed beneath a material wrapping.

Production for exchange in the market is commodity production. At the
beginning of commodity exchange, people bartered one product for another. Later in the long process of
the development of commodity exchange, a particular commodity—money—was separated from other
commodities spontaneously.

Commodity production exists within a certain historical span. It is
bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production. There was no commodity
production in the initial stage of primitive society. In the wake of the development of social productive
forces, there emerged social division of labour and conditions for commodity exchange; only then did
private ownership and commodity production make their appearance. In the future communist society, the
commodity system will perish. Historically, there are three forms of commodity production: simple
commodity production, the capitalist mode of commodity production and the socialist type of commodity
production.

Simple commodity production was based on individual private ownership
of the means of production and on individual labour, such as individual handicrafts and farming. This
was the historical forerunner of capitalist production. Production conditions for each simple commodity
producer differed and individual labour-time spent in producing the same kind of commodity also differed.
But the same kind of commodity could be sold only at the same price in the market. This gave rise to
polarization, i.e., a small number of people could possess a large quantity of commodities and money
which were turned into capital, while a great number of people went bankrupt and had to sell their labour
power. This polarization of the simple commodity producers at the end of feudal society provided the
conditions for the emergence of capitalist relations of production.

The capitalist mode of commodity production is based on the capitalists
possessing the means of production and exploiting wage labour to get surplus-value. Capltalist production
is the highest stage of the development of commodity production. Under it, not only do the general products
of labour take the form of commodities, even labour power becomes a commodity. This kind of commodity
production reveals the economic relations between the exploiters who are the capitalists and the exploited
who are the workers. Its development makes it possible for the capitalists to grab and amass great riches
while the working class becomes poorer day by day.